Customizable Folding Filament Spool

thingiverse

An easy to use folding spool. I made this because I often use filament that comes in a coil, but when I print with it I prefer to have it loaded onto a spool. Manually winding filament from a loose coil onto a large spool is very tedious and annoying work - I'd much rather be designing and printing stuff instead! So this spool will let you quickly load/unload a normal loose coil of filament for printing. Customizable in case you want to have a larger or smaller spool for other purposes, of if you prefer more spokes than 3. [edit]: Makerbot Customizer is stupid. If you want to make a custom variant of this, then download the scad file and export to STL manually. It should be fairly obvious what needs to be edited at the top of the file in order to customize it. Instructions Print without supports - the only place that should require support already has it included in the model (the underside of the spoke fork and finger) Print one each of the top and base parts - these form the central hub. Print a fork and finger for each spoke of the spool - a total of three each. You will need 3x M3 bolts with nuts (anything 13mm or longer will do), and 9x M3 fender washers. These are used to assemble the fingers onto the forks. A pair of washers are sandwiched between the plastic parts, with a third washer under the head of the bolt (there is an indentation in the plastic finger for it). These washers provide a slight amount of reduced friction, allowing the finger to be rotated when loading/unloading filament (without loosening the nut). You will also need 3x M4 bolts (25mm or longer) with nuts to mount the individual spokes to the central hub, which also holds the whole thing together.